The Illusion of Victory (23 page)

Few people in the United States were inclined to criticize this rampaging war will that Creel and Wilson were creating. One of the few was Senator Robert La Follette. Appalled by what the war was doing to the American spirit, he became more and more convinced that an early peace was imperative. When journalist Lincoln Steffens returned from Russia and told him that the new revolutionary Russian army was faltering because its soldiers had been told the Allies were fighting to fulfill greedy secret treaties of conquest, La Follette became even more disgusted with Woodrow Wilson’s war. Next, the German Reichstag adopted a resolution declaring that Germany sought “a peace of mutual agreements and enduring reconciliation of peoples.” La Follette decided to introduce a resolution in the Senate, calling for a restatement of U.S. war aims that would be conducive to a negotiated peace.
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Numerous senators, notably John Sharp Williams of Mississippi, rose to denounce La Follette as a traitor. The Senate refused to consider the resolution. When the Russian army collapsed and the Germans began advancing rapidly into Russia, newspapers reprinted anonymous articles making the preposterous charge that La Follette was responsible for the mounting disaster. An anxious Lincoln Steffens wrote to his friend, warning about “war rage,” which he said was “as dangerous as madness and as unapproachable to reason.”
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Undaunted as usual, La Follette accepted an invitation to speak to the Nonpartisan League, an organization composed largely of small farmers in the states of the old Northwest. When he arrived in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on September 19, 1917, he found his hosts in a state of high anxiety. The meeting was being harassed by Secret Service men and self-appointed patriots, who warned of major trouble if La Follette criticized the war. This was exactly what the senator had intended to do, with a special focus on the refusal of the rich to pay a decent share of the financial burden.

The sponsors grew even more jittery when they read La Follette’s speech. They begged him not to deliver it, and he reluctantly agreed to say only a few extemporaneous words. When La Follette arrived at the auditorium, he found the placed packed with 10,000 people. Another 5,000 jammed the streets outside, agitating to get in. As he walked to the stage, the crowd rose and cheered so fervently, the sponsors changed their minds. Whacking the senator on the back, they shouted,“Go ahead, Bob, make your speech!”

Unfortunately, the senator had left the speech in his hotel room. But he accepted the challenge of speaking without notes, and began by recalling his fight against corporate power in Wisconsin. He was still fighting for the same principles in the Senate of the United States—for fairness and justice for average citizens. The big issue, as he now saw it, was how to pay for this war—which, he added wryly, he had not been in favor of fighting.

The words were greeted with huge cheers. La Follette added:“I don’t mean to say we hadn’t suffered grievances;we had, at the hands of Germany. Serious grievances. . . . They had interfered with the right of American citizens to travel on the high seas—on ships loaded with munitions for Great Britain.”

From somewhere in the audience a voice shouted,“Yellow!” the interruption only spurred the senator to continue down this dangerous path. He still thought “the comparatively small privilege of the right of an American citizen to ride on a munitions-laden ship, flying a foreign flag, is too small to involve this government in the loss of millions . . . of lives.”
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He compared the victims who died on such vessels to someone who went to France and camped near an arsenal. Getting more and more carried away, La Follette said that America should have considered more carefully what it had at stake when it went to war. He also asserted that the
Lusitania
was carrying munitions and that Secretary of State Bryan had asked Wilson to stop Americans from sailing on it but the president had done nothing.

If the only things at stake in the war were loans made by the House of Morgan to foreign governments, and the profits of munitions makers, such things should be weighed, “not on a hay scale, but on an apothecary’s scale.” the implication, of course, was obvious: They were too small for a hay scale. The senator cited Daniel Webster, who questioned the Mexican War when it was at “full tilt,” asking whether there had been “sufficient grievance” to start such a bloody explosion.
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La Follette went on to argue for bigger taxes on the rich, and ended with a swipe at Congress for failing to live up to its constitutional responsibility to oversee the war. In fact, every American had the right “to discuss freely whether this war might be terminated with honor . . . and the awful slaughter discontinued.” He was still angry about the Senate’s refusal to take up his war aims resolution.

The audience gave the senator an ovation. While La Follette and his wife were on a train back to Washington, an Associated Press reporter filed a story quoting the senator as saying: “We had no grievance against Germany.” It produced huge headlines everywhere. In the
New York Times,
it became “La Follette Defends Lusitania Sinking.” theodore Roosevelt called the senator the worst enemy of democracy alive. The governor of Minnesota announced that La Follette might be arrested under the Espionage Act. Nicholas Murray Butler, Columbia University’s president, called for La Follette’s expulsion from the Senate. Butler compared allowing La Follette to speak freely to putting poison in the food of men on troopships to France.
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The day after the speech, Secretary of State Lansing released to the newspapers the text of an intercepted message that Germany’s former ambassador, Count von Bernstorff, had sent to Berlin, asking for $50,000 to influence Congress. The timing of the release was hardly accidental. The newspapers splashed it across their front pages. An Alabama congressman called for an investigation, declaring that he could name thirteen or fourteen members of Congress who had “acted in a suspicious manner.” Called before the House Rules Committee and ordered to name names, he mentioned three congressmen and Senator La Follette. Meanwhile, the secretary of state hastily retreated, saying he had no evidence connecting any legislator with German propaganda.

A week later, La Follette gave another speech in Toledo, Ohio. The city was in the grip of manic war rage. “Vigilante groups hounded, horsewhipped and tarred and feathered war-resisters,” said one minister, who had been dismissed from his church for his antiwar views. Several hotels refused to rent the senator a room, fearing they might be burned down. Forty policemen guarded the packed hall, and when La Follette appeared at a side door, they urged the senator to cancel his speech. He ignored them and spoke about the imperative need for a statement of America’s war aims. He got another ovation, and a local reporter wrote in a puzzled tone that he gave “no special cause for offense.”

Back in Washington, La Follette learned that the Minnesota Public Safety Commission had petitioned the U.S. Senate to expel him. Petitions from similar groups, from the National Security League to the Grand Army of the Republic, soon followed. These appeals were referred to the Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections for investigation. On October 3, the Democratic governor of Wisconsin staged a mass meeting in Madison, at which Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo was the featured speaker. Along the secretary’s parade route were illuminated signs calling La Follette a slacker and a copperhead. Another one read,“La Follette misrepresents Wisconsin. GET HIM OUT.” In his speech, McAdoo made clear his opinion of dissenters:“America intends these well-meaning people who talk inopportunely of peace . . . shall be silenced.” warming to his theme, he added,“Every pacifist speech in this country made at this inopportune and improper time is in effect traitorous.”

That same day, Secretary Lansing informed Senator Frank Kellogg of Minnesota, who had presented the first expulsion petition to the Senate, that there was no record that former Secretary of State Bryan knew ammunition was aboard the
Lusitania
. Lansing had telephoned Bryan, who said he did not find out about the ammunition until three or four days after the sinking. Bryan made a statement to the press corroborating this claim. The administration was now indubitably involved in trying to destroy La Follette.

On October 5, the
New York Times
reported that the Senate’s Privileges and Elections Subcommittee was going to study the evidence while Congress was in recess and hold public hearings on the senator’s possible expulsion in December. Federal Judge Charles F. Amidon of North Dakota wrote to the senator: “It is a time when all the spirits of evil are turned loose. The Kaisers of high finance . . . see this opportunity to turn war patriotism into an engine of attack. They are using it everywhere.” He urged La Follette to somehow keep his spirit “unclouded by hatred.”
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La Follette needed this advice. On the last day of the Senate’s session, he defended himself in a three-hour speech, quoting excerpts from famous statesmen who had spoken out against wars in their time—including Prime Minister David Lloyd George, a fierce critic of the Boer War. Senator Joseph Robinson of Arkansas answered him in a speech that filled five pages of the
Congressional Record.
He came down the aisle and shouted insults in La Follette’s face. Robinson told La Follette to apply to the kaiser for a seat in the Reichstag, implied that the senator had taken German propaganda money, and declared there were “only two sides to this conflict—Germanism and Americanism; the Kaiser or the President.”
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In another part of the war, John J. Pershing was making good on his promise to Theodore Roosevelt to bring his sons to France. No slouch at the political side of his job, when Pershing said farewell to Secretary of War Baker, the general asked how he would react if Pershing cabled a request for the two older boys, Ted and Archie. Baker did the handsome thing and replied that not only did he have no objections, but the two young men should serve as officers. The secretary made Ted a major and Archie a lieutenant.

Pershing passed the word to TR, and the Roosevelts went to work on wangling a berth on a transport. They sailed for France on June 20 aboard a lumbering French ship named, for some unknown reason,
Chicago.
The family came from all directions for a festive farewell party. TR was, of course, the centerpiece. Young Ted’s wife, Eleanor, was more than a little upset when the former president announced in his ebullient way that he expected at least one of his sons to be wounded and possibly killed in France.
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Escorted by a French destroyer,
Chicago
reached Bordeaux without mishap. The two Roosevelts were besieged by Frenchmen asking how many more Americans would arrive soon. The French were crestfallen when they learned the brothers were “not the vanguard of an enormous army which would follow without interruption,” ted told his father. The scene was repeated when they shared a compartment with a group of French soldiers on the trip to Paris.

Pershing assigned the brothers to the First Division, which was training in Lorraine, and Ted was given command of a battalion in the Twenty-Sixth Infantry. Archie soon managed to get himself seconded to the same battalion. Their father thought this was a very bad idea, but they ignored his advice. They both went to work on turning the ragtag collection of discards and raw volunteers into fighting soldiers.

The second oldest Roosevelt son, Kermit, had only spent a few days at the Plattsburgh training camp, not enough to win a commission in the U.S. Army. He decided to volunteer for the British army. His father asked Ambassador Cecil Spring Rice, a close friend, to arrange for Kermit to enlist in Canada. Soon the young man was en route to England to pick up his commission and report to the general in command of the British army fighting the Turks in Mesopotamia. One suspects that Spring Rice had something to do with this assignment. British army lieutenants on the Western Front tended to have very brief careers.

Kermit was the son to whom Roosevelt was closest—and who worried him most. A heavy drinker, given to bouts of the blackest gloom, he had traveled to Africa with his father to shoot lions and later survived a horrendous trip with TR down the River of Doubt, a tributary of the Amazon. Kermit was the only one who could tell his father he had little enthusiasm for the war. He would much prefer to stay home with his wife and newborn son. “The only way I would have been really enthusiastic about going would have been with you,” he wrote later.
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Roosevelt’s youngest son, twenty-year-old Quentin, was as ebullient as Kermit was melancholy. Everyone agreed he was the one who most resembled his father. A gifted writer, he had published surprisingly mature poems and stories in the Groton School magazine. He had the same omnivorous interest in history, literature, languages and politics. Another gift baffled the entire family: Quentin seemed to have an uncommon talent for dealing with machines—to the point of majoring in mechanical engineering at Harvard.

This fondness for technology led him to take a very different path to the war. He joined the U.S. Army Air Service and began flight training at Mineola on Long Island not far from Sagamore Hill, the family home in Oyster Bay. He regularly buzzed the big house to waggle his wings at his father. Another target was the mansion of Harry Payne and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in nearby Old Westbury. There lived the love of Quentin’s life, beautiful Flora Payne Whitney, heiress to an immense fortune.

These two privileged young people had slowly, warily, fallen in love over the previous two years. They were both aware of the social distance between them. Flora’s father and mother regarded Theodore Roosevelt as a political revolutionary. Quentin’s father had an even lower opinion of “the dull purblind folly of the very rich . . . their greed and arrogance.” when Quentin proposed in the spring of 1917, he added in a note: “I haven’t yet seen my family. I wonder if they’ll approve.”
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